Generally, wireless and mobile broadband and video traffic has increased tremendously in recent years. This trend has no signs of abating, while challenges continually present themselves in handling the growing traffic. A limited wireless spectrum and an inadequate wireless backhaul infrastructure represent but examples of the hindrances. As such, 3G wireless network operators continually are seeking optimizations that can help in deferring infrastructure upgrades.
One simple and effective method to reduce the backhaul traffic is to cache frequently requested content at proxies at the edge elements, such as base stations (BS), of a wireless network. However, traditional full-object caching policies may not be effective for Video-on-Demand (VoD) and other types of multimedia traffic. This is because video objects tend to be much larger in size than traditional web objects, and the number of video clips in general keeps increasing by the day. More specifically, since video objects are very large, if cached in entirety, the caching of wrong objects can significantly deteriorate performance. Caching in entirety can also hinder performance, since in many cases videos tend to be viewed by a user only partially. Additionally, a video can have multiple anchor points or regions, including many that do not begin at the first byte of the video. As such, storing a prefix of the video will not always be optimal (wherein an anchor point or region is a video portion around which viewing tends to be heavy). Finally, the anchor points may be only approximate and unknown ahead of time, and would need to be determined based on user accesses. For the above-stated reasons and more, challenges have often been encountered in determining which portions to cache of a large object that may be accessed from any offset and for any length, not necessarily from the beginning or until the end. Solutions continue to be elusive, and have performed poorly for objects that have multiple anchor points, or anchor points that do not begin at the first bytes and which are unknown ahead of time.